SANA, Yemen — Thousands of tribesmen threatened Thursday to descend on Yemen’s capital to join the battle against forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh as the country slid deeper into an all-out fight for power. Government forces in Sana unleashed some of the heaviest shelling yet against their tribal rivals in a dramatic escalation of the conflict.
For months, youth-led protesters have tried to drive out Saleh peacefully. But their campaign has been overtaken and transformed into an armed showdown between Yemen’s two most powerful families, the president’s and the al-Ahmar clan. The al-Ahmar family heads the country’s strongest tribal confederation, which has vowed to topple Saleh after 33 years in power.
Their nearly 2-week-old battle in Sana raises a dangerous new potential in Yemen: that tribal fighting could metastasize and spread across the impoverished nation. Tribes hold deep loyalty among Yemen’s 25 million people, and the death of a member can easily draw relatives into a spiral of violence.
On Thursday, tribesmen attacked security forces in the city of Taiz, south of the capital, apparently to avenge deaths of protesters there last week or to protect them from new crackdowns. Saleh’s security forces have cracked down hard on the street protesters, killing more than 100 people since February, but until now tribal fighters had stayed out of the fray. Thursday’s attack suggests other tribes might see the fighting between Saleh and al-Ahmar as a sign it is time to get out their guns as well.
Deeply worrisome to the United States in particular is the possibility that al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen — one of the terrorism network’s most active franchises in the world — will exploit the chaos.
In Sana, Saleh’s troops battered al-Ahmar’s positions with some of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the conflict.There was no immediate word on deaths or casualties in the fighting, which has killed more than 160 people since it erupted.
The regime also was marshaling its forces: The Defense Ministry said for the first time in a statement that special forces units commanded by Saleh’s son Ahmed had joined the fight.
In the mountains outside the capital, several thousand fighters loyal to al-Ahmar were camped out on the highway to Sana, prepared to move in and join the battle, according to a tribal leader, Mohammed al-Hamdani.
With a potentially decisive battle for the capital looming, the campaign to oust Saleh is increasingly taken out of the hands of those who launched it: the hundreds of thousands who have been holding daily protests in the capital and other cities.
